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On October 13, 1971, Intel Corp, a manufacturer of semi-conductor memory circuits went public with a common stock underwriting of 350,000 shares at $23.50 per share for a total of $8.225M and for a post money value of $58M.

In the previous six months the company had revenues of $3,978,000 and profit before extraordinary items of $93,000. This offering included 42,000 shares for selling shareholders.

There were 64 underwriters in the group of which only 5 remain today as an independent entity with the original name (coincidentally one of the survivors in another form was the lead underwriter for the offering – CE Unterberg Towbin & Co.)

On April 18, 1972, CE Unterberg Towbin also took Datascope Corporate public, “a company engaged in the design and development of medical instrumentation” with an offering of 105,000 shares at $19 per share raising $2,011,000 of which $977,000 went to selling shareholders.

The company post offering value was $9M. There were no other underwriters. In the previous six months Datascope had revenues of $973,000 and a profit after full taxes of $130,000.

In 2009, Datascope was sold to a Swedish company for $865M and had reported annual revenues at the time of $230M. Intel recently reported revenues for their third quarter ended September 30th of $11B.

To add further to the flavor of what the public markets and IPOs were like: In 1972 Storage Technology went public with an offer of $13M; In 1976 Four Phase Systems raised $15M and Cray Research raised $10M; In 1977 Tandem Computers went public raising $9.4M and in 1980 Sci-Tex raised $6.8M.

As recently as 1986 Adobe had an IPO raising $6M. None of these companies could have gone public in today’s environment even adjusting for inflation. Virtually all the buyers at the time were individuals and there was a robust “over the counter” after market for young companies.

Transactions took place over the telephone and spreads were well above today’s prescribed margins. Bids and offers were published daily in the pink sheets along with their market makers. As noted above, almost all of the underwriters are gone today and all trading, which was done over the telephone, is now done electronically.